“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” — Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980)
Between Worlds, Monterey, CA, 2006
Every so often nature has a way of making you feel small without making you feel like you don’t matter.
I took this photo at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. A kid is standing in front of a wall of sea anemones, quiet, almost like he’s stepped into another world and is waiting for it to say something.
It doesn’t, of course. Nature doesn’t usually bother explaining itself.
What it does offer is patterns.
The anemones repeat across the glass, but never exactly the same way. Each one has its own shape, its own little architecture of tentacles. Together they make something bigger than any single one of them. Looking at them, I keep noticing those visual rhymes that show up everywhere in nature—spirals in shells, the way trees branch, the geometry of leaves, the swirl of water, the shapes clouds take.
And if you keep going outward, the same kinds of structures show up again. Galaxies spiral. Nebulae curl and branch. Stars gather into vast formations. Math seems to keep turning up, from the almost invisible to the unimaginably large.
It’s one of those facts that can make an ordinary afternoon suddenly feel a little unreal. You’re standing in an aquarium looking at sea anemones, and somehow you’ve ended up thinking about the architecture of the universe.
I kind of like that.
The world is not merely around us
I’ve always been drawn to the space between what we see and what we sense. My photographs usually start with something ordinary, but I’m rarely content to leave it that way. I want to know what else might be tucked inside it.
This one began with a child looking at marine life. The longer I live with the image, though, the more another story starts to surface.
The boy isn’t just observing nature. He’s part of it.
There’s something ancient about a child standing in front of the unknown and simply looking. Before we learn how to classify and measure and explain and photograph and publish, and occasionally overthink everything, we have a more basic response: wonder.
Maybe that’s one reason I’m drawn to this photograph. It reminds us that looking can be an encounter instead of just consumption.
The aquarium becomes a kind of threshold. On one side, the human world. On the other, a miniature ocean with its own rhythms and histories. Between them stands a child, quietly occupying both.
Suddenly the glass feels less like a barrier and more like a membrane.
Patterns within patterns
The old idea of Anima Mundi—the “soul of the world”—suggests the universe isn’t just a huge pile of unrelated stuff, but something alive and connected. In Plato’s Timaeus the cosmos is imagined as a living thing whose order shows up in mathematical relationships and harmony. Later thinkers took the idea in all sorts of directions, from the Stoics’ divine principle running through matter to Jung’s shared psychological dimension.
I don’t need to decide whether the universe literally has a soul.
What interests me more is what happens when we start acting as if we belong to something larger than ourselves.
The idea has stuck around for more than two thousand years partly because it gives language to an intuition that won’t go away: the boundaries we draw between ourselves and the natural world may be useful, but they aren’t absolute.
Modern ecological thinking reaches toward something similar, though without the metaphysical claims. The Gaia hypothesis, for instance, treats Earth and its biosphere as a self-regulating system rather than just a passive stage for life.
Maybe art starts in that same territory. We notice a pattern. We sense a connection. We don’t quite know what it means. So we make something.
The child and the universe
I imagine the boy in this photograph growing older.
Maybe one day he’ll forget the aquarium completely. He’ll remember other things: school, friends, disappointments, the strange bureaucracy of adulthood, passwords he can no longer recall, and an alarming number of emails.
But maybe some small piece of this moment stays with him. The feeling of standing in front of something alive and intricate. The sense that the world is much larger than the room he’s in. The possibility that the patterns in front of him belong to a much greater pattern he can’t yet grasp.
That, to me, is one of the quiet gifts of nature. It doesn’t demand that we understand everything. It just asks us to notice.
When I look at the photograph now, I no longer see only a boy looking into an aquarium. I see one small consciousness meeting another form of life, while behind both of them stretches an immense continuum of patterns, from the ocean floor all the way out to the farthest reaches of the cosmos.
And maybe that’s the real subject of the photograph. Not the child. Not the anemones. Not even the aquarium.
It’s the moment we realize we’re inside the picture.
We’re observers, yes. But we’re also participants. The universe isn’t just something we look at. It’s something we belong to.
Carl Sagan's quote above may be one of the most accurate descriptions of our peculiar condition.
We look outward, and discover ourselves looking back.
Artist Statement
I am interested in the moment when observation becomes connection.
A child standing before an aquarium becomes, for me, more than a viewer of marine life. He becomes a small consciousness encountering a world that existed long before him and will continue long after him. The patterns within that underwater landscape suggest larger structures found throughout nature and the cosmos, reminding me that the boundaries between things are often less certain than we imagine.
My photographs frequently begin with the visible but search for the invisible. I am drawn to those quiet thresholds where an ordinary scene begins to suggest something larger: memory, mystery, transformation, or belonging.
Perhaps this photograph is ultimately about that ancient human impulse to look outward and ask where we fit.
And perhaps the answer is hidden in the simplest place.
We are already inside the pattern.